Does the Representation of Politics Present a Specific Challenge to Creative Prose Fiction? Doctoral Thesis, Northumbria University
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Citation: Spain, David (2019) Does the Representation of Politics Present a Specific Challenge to Creative Prose Fiction? Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University. This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/39772/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html DOES THE REPRESENTATION OF POLITICS PRESENT A SPECIFIC CHALLENGE TO CREATIVE PROSE FICTION? Volume 1 of 2 D H Spain PhD 2018 DOES THE REPRESENTATION OF POLITICS PRESENT A SPECIFIC CHALLENGE TO CREATIVE PROSE FICTION? DAVID HARRISSON SPAIN A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Research undertaken in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Social Sciences Abstract The political novel serves an important function, offering an exploration of political institutions, provoking discourse and inspiring engagement. The aim of this study is to identify the difficulties in producing a political novel and how they might be overcome. By ‘political novel’, this thesis refers to a novel which explores political processes, the exercise of political power or the effects of such political action upon the body politic. To this end, the research question is as follows: does politics as a subject matter and discourse present a specific challenge to creative prose fiction? The research question is answered through practice-based research in the form of writing a political novel as well as the production of a commentary which reflects upon this creative process. This project argues that the political novelist must overcome several problems inherent in the fictional representation of politics. The first of these is the difficulty of containing the elements of political detail, thought and action within a work of fiction, due to its potential to disrupt the flow of narrative through its opaque and complex nature; the second is the issue of the mode through which the fiction is to be related to the reader and the consequences the use of different narrative voices will have on the presentation of political activity. Finally, there is the challenge of ensuring that an accurate representation of the political scene and relevant political attitudes is achieved. This study proposes that through the combination of the political elements with personal feeling and affect within the writing, these challenges can be answered in a manner which empowers their writing with a vitality which invigorates the political action within the novel. CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE ........................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER TWO ..................................................................................................... 11 CHAPTER THREE ................................................................................................. 30 CHAPTER FOUR .................................................................................................... 37 CHAPTER FIVE ...................................................................................................... 54 CHAPTER SIX ........................................................................................................ 72 CHAPTER SEVEN .................................................................................................. 89 CHAPTER EIGHT ................................................................................................ 104 CHAPTER NINE ................................................................................................... 117 CHAPTER TEN ..................................................................................................... 134 CHAPTER ELEVEN ............................................................................................. 148 CHAPTER TWELVE ............................................................................................ 166 CHAPTER THIRTEEN ........................................................................................ 177 CHAPTER FOURTEEN ....................................................................................... 183 CHAPTER FIFTEEN ............................................................................................ 203 CHAPTER SIXTEEN ............................................................................................ 221 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ..................................................................................... 238 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ........................................................................................ 258 EPILOGUE ............................................................................................................. 270 Acknowledgements I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisors, Professor Michael Green and Professor Keith Shaw for their input, expertise and support, and Northumbria University for enabling me to undertake this exploration of the political novel. I would also like to thank my family, Tim, Nicola and Charlotte Spain for all their encouragement throughout this project, and Shreya Kakkar for proving that her presence improves everything – even this novel. And, finally, I’d like to thank politics in general for becoming so utterly absurd halfway through this damn novel in what I am forced to assume was a somehow- conscious effort to improve the overall quality of my writing. I truly appreciate the help, but you really can stop now. Really. Please. Declaration I declare that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for any other award and that it is all my own work. I also confirm that this work fully acknowledges opinions, ideas and contributions from the work of others. Any ethical clearance for the research presented in this thesis has been approved. Approval has been sought and granted by the Faculty Ethics Committee on 31st August 2016. I declare that the Word Count of this Thesis is 147,971 words (novel: 115,673 words, commentary: 32,298 words) Name: David Harrisson Spain Signature: A NORTHERN EXIT A Political Novel by David Spain CHAPTER ONE I had just turned twenty-three when Julian Ashworth and I first crossed paths. Most of my reluctance to take a good long look at my life was because I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the rest of it. A year before, I had graduated from St Andrews with an upper-class second in English Literature. This achievement, I soon discovered, left my options depressingly open, and I had walked out of that fine institution with just as much of a plan for the future as I’d had four years before. Less, in fact, because by then there were far fewer kinds of alcohol I had yet to experiment with. I managed to bear my lack of direction stoically. I’d never been particularly proud of the money I’d been born into, but in the months following my graduation I quickly learned to appreciate the freedom it offered and not think too much about what exactly the grumpy-looking old bastards in the family portraits had done to get hold of it. Most of the Barrett clan considered an occupation to be more of a pastime than a necessity. There were a few of us holding down a profession, each of which had been considered ‘acceptable’ by whatever familial committee decided on these things. But seen through a purely financial lens, there was no need for me to find myself a job. I ended up doing so, or at least having one found for me, for two reasons. The first was that the boredom which had arrived at about the same time as my graduation photographs didn’t fade away with time. Whatever distractions I threw myself at never managed to keep my attention, and more and more I found myself drifting off to sleep in the melancholy certainty that tomorrow would be just as dull and uneventful a day as the one I’d just forced my way through. Boredom steadily shifted into apathy and forcing myself out of my malaise became more difficult with each passing day. The second was a woman called Mrs Amelia Barrett, who just so happened to be my mother. While my father took the view that I’d just put in three years of hard work plus one year of dossing around and deserved a little bit of time free from essays, exams and whatever had made his own university experience so trying, my mother took a far more definite line than he and I did on what constituted ‘their’ and ‘my’ money. She regarded it as part of her matriarchal duties, and there was no woman more fitted to matriarchy than Mrs Barrett, to offer me more pointed motivation than simple 1 boredom could provide, steering more and more of our conversations towards my future prospects. After the second week of her campaign to stamp out domestic unemployment, I could barely make a cup of coffee without having